Abstract
As a result of industry dissension and a record of previous unsuccessful attempts to launch commercial television in the US, the early postwar period constitutes a moment of unusual introspection and uncertainty within the broadcast industry about the place of the new medium in the home. The debates about the viability of commercial television within the trade and financial presses of the late 1940s were often framed by the discursive figures of the male electronics hobbyist and the female homemaker-viewer. Themselves the legacies of controversies in the 1920s over the social uses of radio broadcasting, the gendered poles of amateur and housewife continue to structure the policy options and broader ways of thinking about electronic media in the home, from postwar television to contemporary computer-based multimedia.
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